google watch

 

How much do you rely on google, for email, discussion groups, video, etc?

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community. One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.

Despite the aura of heroic young enterprise that still miraculously attaches to the web, what we are seeing is a much older and toxic capitalist model - the classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits. Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time. On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues - in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn. Its monopolistic tendencies took an extra twist this weekend with rumours that it may buy the micro-blogging site Twitter and its plans - contested by academics - to scan a vast library of books that are out of print but still in copyright.

One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google's fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive. Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.

Google users can now make phone calls directly from their Gmail inbox, the company announced Wednesday.

The new feature is fully integrated into the Google Chat interface that’s already in Gmail, and users can search their Google contacts and make phone calls to those people the same way they can currently launch a chat session or a video chat session.

Pricing is cheap — calls to the U.S. and Canada are free, and PC-to-phone calls to dozens of countries around the world are only two cents per minute. If you’re routing Google Voice to your mobile phone, rates for calls to the United Kingdom, France, India, Spain and Mexico are all under 20 cents per minute.

“We went through a couple of exercises when figuring our how to price it,” says Google product manager for group communications Craig Walker. He says they wanted to make it competitive with other PC-to-phone technologies, like Skype.

The move has prompted some to speculate that Google is going after Skype, but the real target here isn’t a cheap telephony company — it’s Facebook.

While there’s no reason to limit this to Gmail users, Google is looking to cement both Gmail and Google accounts as central to web user’s experiences. That’s why Google didn’t release a standalone application today — which would have signaled an assault on Skype.

Instead the new service is intended to play to Google’s current successes, namely Android phones — which integrate closely with Gmail and Google Voice — as well as set the stage for Google’s rumored fall launch of a social networking service to compete with Facebook.

For cyber-optimists and cyber-pessimists alike, the advent of Google marks off two very distinct periods in Internet history. The optimists remember the age before Google as chaotic, inefficient, and disorganized. Most search engines at the time had poor ethics (some made money by misrepresenting ads as search results) and terrible algorithms (some could not even find their parent companies online). All of that changed when two Stanford graduate students invented an ingenious way to rank Web pages based on how many other pages link to them. Other innovations spurred by Google—especially its novel platform for selling highly targeted ads—have created a new “ecosystem” (the optimists’ favorite buzzword) for producing and disseminating information. Thanks to Google, publishers of all stripes—from novice bloggers in New Delhi to media mandarins in New York—could cash in on their online popularity.

Cyber-pessimists see things quite differently. They wax nostalgic for the early days of the Web when discovery was random, and even fun. They complain that Google has destroyed the joy of serendipitous Web surfing, while its much-celebrated ecosystem is just a toxic wasteland of info-junk. Worse, it’s being constantly polluted by a contingent of “content farms” that produce trivial tidbits of information in order to receive a hefty advertising paycheck from the Googleplex. The skeptics charge that the company treats information as a commodity, trivializing the written word and seeking to turn access to knowledge into a dubious profit-center. Worst of all, Google’s sprawling technology may have created a digital panopticon, making privacy obsolete....

 

Ultimately, “Don’t Be Evil” makes as much sense as a corporate motto as it does as a motto of American foreign policy: it provides no answers to any of the important questions while giving those who embrace it an illusion of rectitude. Even Levy, for all his hagiographical celebration of Google’s prowess, acknowledges that the company has a “blind spot regarding the consequences” of its actions. That blind spot is entirely self-inflicted. It is very nice that Google employs someone whose job title is “in-house philosopher,” but in the absence of any real desire to practice philosophy such a position seems superfluous and vainglorious....

 

So far Google has not made much progress in acknowledging the political nature of its services, accepting that algorithms can be as flawed and biased as the coders writing them, or finding a way to help users report what Google got wrong without having to sue the giant. Occasionally, the individuals hurt by Google bring their grievances to the media (a New York Times story about a Brooklyn entrepreneur—who abused his customers so they would complain about his company on blogs and Internet forums and thus boost his search ranking—did help to change the algorithms); but this is not a sustainable way to resolve users’ problems with Google. Yes, there would always be concerns about the freedom of expression and the need to balance one’s quest for privacy with the speech rights of others; and Google would surely need to dedicate a lion’s share of resources to monitor such complaints. But simply refusing to open the Pandora’s box of information injustice that it has been causing—as Google has done to date—is no longer a tenable strategy for the company. It can’t get away by redirecting blame to its own algorithms forever.